The Fourth Murray Leinster Read online

  He hesitates. But just then Deeth comes in. He beams friendly at Inspector Caldwell.

  “A compliment for you, ma’am. Three of them.”

  She goggles at him. Brooks says, gentle, “It’s all right. Deeth, show them in and get some presents.”

  Inspector Caldwell splutters incredulous, “But—but—”

  “Don’t be angry,” says Brooks. “They mean it as a compliment. It is, actually, you know.”

  Three Moklin girls come in, giggling. They are not bad-looking at all. They look as human as Deeth, but one of them has a long, droopy mustache like a mate of the Palmyra—that’s because they hadn’t ever seen a human woman before Inspector Caldwell come along. They sure have admired her, though! And Moklin kids get born fast. Very fast.

  They show her what they are holding so proud and happy in their arms. They have got three little Moklin kids, one apiece. And every one of them has red hair, just like Inspector Caldwell, and every one of them is a girl that is the spit and image of her. You would swear they are human babies, and you’d swear they are hers. But of course they ain’t. They make kid noises and wave their little fists.

  Inspector Caldwell is just plain paralyzed. She stares at them, and goes red as fire and white as chalk, and she is speechless. So Brooks has to do the honors. He admires the kids extravagant, and the Moklin girls giggle, and take the compliment presents Deeth brings in, and they go out happy.

  When the door closes, Inspector Caldwell wilts.

  “Oh-h!” she wails. “It’s true! You didn’t—you haven’t—they can make their babies look like anybody they want!”

  Brooks puts his arms around her and she begins to cry against his shoulder. He pats her and says, “They’ve got a queer sort of evolution on Moklin, darling. Babies here inherit desired characteristics. Not acquired characteristics, but desired ones! And what could be more desirable than you?”

  I am blinking at them. He says to me, cold, “Will you kindly get the hell out of here and stay out?”

  I come to. I says, “Just one precaution.”

  I wiggle my little finger. He crosses his fingers at me.

  “Then,” I says, “since there’s no chance of a mistake, I’ll leave you two together.”

  And I do.

  * * * *

  The Palmyra booms down out of the sky two days later. We are all packed up. Inspector Caldwell is shaky, on the porch of the post, when Moklins come hollering and waving friendly over from the landing field pulling a freight-truck with Cap Haney on it. I see other festive groups around members of the crew that—this being a scheduled stop—have been given ship-leave for a couple hours to visit their Moklin friends.

  “I’ve got the usual cargo—” begins Cap Haney.

  “Don’t discharge it,” says Inspector Caldwell, firm. “We are abandoning this post. I have authority and Mr. Brooks has convinced me of the necessity for it. Please get our baggage to the ship.”

  He gapes at her. “The Company don’t like to give in to competition—”

  “There isn’t any competition,” says Inspector Caldwell. She gulps. “Darling, you tell him,” she says to Brooks.

  He says, lucid, “She’s right, Captain. The other trading post is purely a Moklin enterprise. They like to do everything that humans do. Since humans were running a trading post, they opened one too. They bought goods from us and pretended to sell them at half price, and we cut our prices, and they bought more goods from us and pretended to sell at half the new prices…. Some Moklin or other must’ve thought it would be nice to be a smart businessman, so his kids would be smart businessmen. Too smart! We close up this post before Moklins think of other things….”

  He means, of course, that if Moklins get loose from their home planet and pass as humans, their kids can maybe take over human civilization. Human nature couldn’t take that! But it is something to be passed on to the high brass, and not told around general.

  “Better sound the emergency recall signal,” says Inspector Caldwell, brisk.

  We go over to the ship and the Palmyra lets go that wailing siren that’ll carry twenty miles. Any crew member in hearing is going to beat it back to the ship full-speed. They come running from every which way, where they been visiting their Moklin friends. And then, all of a sudden, here comes a fellow wearing Moklin guest garments, yelling, “Hey! Wait! I ain’t got my clothes—”

  And then there is what you might call a dead silence. Because lined up for checkoff is another guy that comes running at the recall signal, and he is wearing ship’s clothes, and you can see that him and the guy in Moklin guest garments are just exactly alike. Twins. Identical. The spit and image of each other. And it is for sure that one of them is a Moklin. But which?

  Cap Haney’s eyes start to pop out of his head. But then the guy in Palmyra uniform grins and says, “Okay, I’m a Moklin. But us Moklins like humans so much, I thought it would be nice to make a trip to Earth and see more humans. My parents planned it five years ago, made me look like this wonderful human, and hid me for this moment. But we would not want to make any difficulties for humans, so I have confessed and I will leave the ship.”

  He takes it as a joke on him. He talks English as good as anybody. I don’t know how anybody could tell which was the human guy and which one the Moklin, but this Moklin grins and steps down, and the other Moklins admire him enormous for passing even a few minutes as human among humans.

  We get away from there so fast, he is allowed to keep the human uniform.

  * * * *

  Moklin is the first planet that humans ever get off of, moving fast, breathing hard, and sweating copious. It’s one of those things that humans just can’t take. Not that there’s anything wrong with Moklins. They’re swell folks. They like humans. But humans just can’t take the idea of Moklins passing for human and being all the things humans want to be themselves. I think it’s really a false alarm. I’ll find out pretty soon.

  Inspector Caldwell and Brooks get married, and they go off to a post on Briarius Four—a swell place for a honeymoon if there ever was one—and I guess they are living happy ever after. Me, I go to the new job the Company assigns me—telling me stern not to talk about Moklin, which I don’t—and the Space Patrol orders no human ship to land on Moklin for any reason.

  But I’ve been saving money and worrying. I keep thinking of those three Moklin kids that Inspector Caldwell knows she ain’t the father of. I worry about those kids. I hope nothing’s happened to them. Moklin kids grow up fast, like I told you. They’ll be just about grown now.

  I’ll tell you. I’ve bought me a little private spacecruiser, small but good. I’m shoving off for Moklin next week. If one of those three ain’t married, I’m going to marry her, Moklin-style, and bring her out to a human colony planet. We’ll have some kids. I know just what I want my kids to be like. They’ll have plenty of brains—top-level brains—and the girls will be real good-looking!

  But besides that, I’ve got to bring some other Moklins out and start them passing for human, too. Because my kids are going to need other Moklins to marry, ain’t they? It’s not that I don’t like humans. I do! If the fellow I look like—Joe Brinkley—hadn’t got killed accidental on that hunting trip with Deeth, I never would have thought of taking his place and being Joe Brinkley. But you can’t blame me for wanting to live among humans.

  Wouldn’t you, if you was a Moklin?

  CRAZY MARRIAGE

  IT WAS one of those crazy war marriages that haven’t got any sense to them. Hanna had played Sara in The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, and she was Alice in Johnny Get Your Gun, and Laura in Castle in the Sky. Hollywood was her oyster, opened in cracked ice and served to her on a platter. And then at this Hollywood canteen, where she’d gone because the studio liked it and she wanted to, anyway—well, she met Joe Spuggs, private first class, U. S. Marine Corps. In three weeks she married him.

  It hadn’t any sense to it. Joe was a decent enough guy in his way, of course. He used to run a
garage in some hick town near Sioux City, and he was probably good to his mother and bought War Bonds and all. But Hanna—hell!

  Rosenblum stood to make six or eleven fortunes out of Hanna, and he’d been in the business long enough to know that the way to make money is to keep people anxious to work for you. Hanna was in the chips. She’d already rented herself a house with a swimming pool and all the trimmings; she was headed for the top-salary brackets and, generally speaking, she had everything—including the everything most girls expect to part with long before they’re stars. And then she had to go and marry Joe Spuggs!

  It was crazy, all right. Joe wasn’t even good publicity. He hadn’t any medals, and he wasn’t specially good-looking. It just didn’t make sense. After they were married, he went to a couple of parties with her when he got leave, and once he was photographed with her at a ringside table, but that was all. They’d hardly been married a month before he seemed to have vanished; you just saw Hanna at the places the publicity department told her to go, and she was there by herself.

  It was a script girl who told the truth. She’d gone down to camp to see her boy friend, and she saw Hanna there, dancing with Joe. And Hanna grinned at her and she and Joe came over, and Hanna asked her not to talk about it in town.

  It seemed Joe had ideas, such as that he was the head of the family and he had to finance what family life they had, and his pay wouldn’t stand Hollywood night clubs.

  So Hanna was coming down to camp when she could, and they’d have hot dogs and beer and spend week ends together—when he could wangle a pass—at dinky little hotels that his fifty-something a month would pay for. And Hanna’s contract had been rewritten; she made as much in a week as Joe’d ever made in a year!

  Then Joe went overseas. Hanna still didn’t talk much about him. She looked and acted the same, and if she bought a lot of War Bonds—why, that’s standard stuff in Hollywood like any other place.

  She made Part-time Wolf and Don’t You Believe Me? She did Pay Check, too, and she started on Mission to Keokuk. Her pictures were knockouts, and she was getting closer to the top all the time. But Joe was just—well, nothing in particular.

  He was on Guadalcanal and lived through it, and he was on New Georgia, but he didn’t get any publicity breaks. He was just one of the guys that kill Japs and get killed, and sweat over the jobs that don’t make headlines, but only make them possible. He was a corporal by now, and he knew how it felt to be bitten by every known bug, and he swallowed enough quinine to outfit six drugstores, but nothing much had happened to him. Of course, he’d killed the regulation number of Japs but not enough to be spectacular.

  Hanna didn’t seem to mind. She kept her mouth shut about Joe and bought War Bonds and did all the other stuff the publicity department asked her to. Nothing spectacular, but she did it nicely.

  When she gave blood at the blood-donation center, she grinned at the cameraman the studio had sent along, and he got a swell picture. But she fainted while the blood donation was going on, and it turned out she’d been giving blood at another center under her own name, and this was her second in a week. At the other place, nobody knew her as Hanna Lawrence, but only as Mrs. Joe Spuggs.

  It was all crazy! Maybe the end of it was craziest of all. In Mission to Keokuk, Hanna had a scene where she got soaking wet, standing under an arc lamp in a thunderstorm to meet a character who was supposed to be an F.B.I. undercover man. They had a lot of trouble with that scene, and she stayed soaking wet about four hours doing it. And she took a cold and went down with double pneumonia.

  Rosenblum was fit to be tied. Hanna’d made a fool of herself, tearing down her strength being the way she thought Mrs. Joe Spuggs ought to besides being Hanna Lawrence. And she took that pneumonia hard. It was touch and go in spite of sulfa drugs and good doctors.

  They had to postpone Mission to Keokuk until she got well. And then she took something else. Scarlet fever, it was, and when they told her, she grinned sort of weakly and said maybe she ought to apologize to Rosenblum for not having had it before—and was there a letter for her at home in a V-mail envelope from somebody named Spuggs? The hospital thought she was delirious, at first, but they finally brought it to her. Those V-mail letters came along regularly.

  When Joe got hurt, the hospital suppressed the telegram, but the V-mail letters kept on coming for a while, and that was all right. But when they stopped, Hanna began to fret and slip back. Scarlet fever on top of pneumonia is bad. It was a nurse who finally had sense enough to smuggle the wire to her.

  Hanna read it and pulled herself together. She began to send telegrams of her own and getting everybody she knew to pull wires-and darned if somebody didn’t find out that Joe was on his way home on a hospital ship!

  When the hospital ship docked, Hanna was right there to meet it. She was wobbly on her legs, and she was thin as the devil. She looked like somebody who’d been plenty sick, but she still had a swell smile. And she and Joe just looked at each other and held hands, both of them grinning like fools. None of the reporters recognized her.

  But that was the end of it. When Joe got out of the hospital, about a month later, Hanna had a flat ready for him to move into. She was there, too. They settled down to build each other up, eating economically and sitting in the sun and looking at each other a lot. They seemed to be having a swell time.

  Huh? Why didn’t she take him to the house with the swimming pool, and why be economical?

  That’s the craziest part of all. Hanna was broke. The hospital stuff cost money, and she hadn’t been putting anything away. Joe had the head-of-the-family idea, you know, and figured that he had to support his wife and wouldn’t stand for anything else. So Hanna’d been throwing a lot of cash into Army and Navy Relief, and the Red Cross got most of the rest. It would have made swell publicity, but she’d given her name as Mrs. Joe Spuggs; nobody knew the difference.

  HER agent—the one who’d built her up into the big money—came to see them after Joe had been out of the Marines for a couple of months. He got an honorable discharge. Physical disability.

  Anyhow, her agent went over to the flat with a long face. He’d made a lot of money representing Hanna, and he had bad news. But he found the two of them packing up and seemingly feeling swell. He had to tell Hanna that her option was dropped—even after all those pictures.

  “I know,” said Hanna, grinning. “I went down to see Mr. Rosenblum the other day. It’s what I expected. I’ve got a mirror.”

  The agent figured she and Joe would be broke, and he’d made up his mind to stand the bite for a couple of hundred. But she said, “We’re packing up now to go home. Joe’s going to start up his garage again.

  “She’d never been where Joe came from, but she called it home. The agent blinked. He looked at Joe, and Joe was scarred some, but he looked happy.

  The agent said, “Well … uh …. You’ve had a tough time. Would some cash help out? You can pay me back any time.”

  “Thanks,” said Hanna, “but we’re okay. We’re rich! I’ve got all Joe’s allotment checks saved. They pile up, when a man’s away for a long time.”

  The agent said, “Oh!” Then he remembered. “And you got a lot of War Bonds, too, haven’t you? They’ll be a help.”

  “We wouldn’t cash those!” Hanna said indignantly. “We’re going to save them for our family!”

  The agent grabbed his hat and went out in a hurry to tell Rosenblum he was the craziest man in the world if he didn’t realize that Hanna was ten times prettier than she’d ever been before, and that Rosenblum was nuts to drop her contract.

  But Rosenblum couldn’t see it. Anyhow, Hanna mightn’t have stayed in pictures. You see, she’d made one of those crazy war marriages that haven’t got any sense to them.

  Ending, with Honor

  THE lagoon was very blue, and the beach was very white, and the sun was extremely hot. The schooner went on across the lagoon toward the native village. The man on the veranda waited for the other white man to w
alk up from the beach where the small boat had landed him. He said over his shoulder, “It’s him, all right!”

  His voice was grim; almost savage. There was a stirring and a sound like a gasp inside the house. Then silence.

  The man from the schooner strode up, unsmiling. The other man smoked grimly; his jaw was tightly clamped on the stem of his pipe. His eyes were intent and defiant.

  The newcomer stopped short two yards from the steps. He nodded. “Howdo,” he said without expression. “My name’s Holmes. Does it mean anything in particular to you?”

  The man on the veranda took his pipe out of his mouth and seemed to consider. But he remained grim and watchful. “No …” he said deliberately, “I can’t say that it does. Should it? Can I do something for you?”

  “You might invite me out of the sun,” said the newcomer. “It’s rather hot, and I’ve come a long way. Several thousand miles, in fact.”

  The man on the veranda made a gesture which could be construed as an invitation. The newcomer came solidly up the steps, nodded once more, and fumbled in his pocket. The other man tensed a little. He looked ready for anything. But the newcomer only brought out a cigarette. He lighted it.

  “Your name’s Manning,” he explained. “My wife ran away with someone named Manning. You seemed the right one. I came to see. When one’s wife runs off, one has a sort of obligation to look over the new menage.”

  “I’ve told you,” said Manning harshly, “your name means nothing to me!”

  The newcomer shrugged. He sat down deliberately. His host remained standing beside one of the posts of the veranda.

  “I’ve sent the schooner across the lagoon,” said Holmes. “The skipper wanted to drop off some stores, and I wanted to settle my affair without disturbance. I told him to send the boat ashore for me when he came back. I was sure that you were the one. Since you’re not, what do I do now? Shall I go and sit on the beach?”

  Manning made an impatient gesture. “I’ll get you a drink,” he said ungraciously. “I’ve sent my houseboy off on an errand. I’m alone here. Wait a moment.”